Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Shutting Up. Keeping My Head Down.

I realize I spend a significant amount of time complaining about not writing.

This, I believe, is the natural ebb and flow for a writer. I know I need to get sick of hearing myself complain about non-productivity. When you're in the presence of a nag, the initial effect of the nag is nullified (YMMV). I know, at least, when my folks nagged me as a teen, I didn't get anything that they had wanted done until after they stopped nagging me. So, I'm still giving myself the finger and doing my own thing--watching The Wire. Eating potato chips. Surfing the web. I do feel myself getting bored of my leisure.

Soon, I predict, I'll get off my ass and start to work on some new materials.

***

So, what's on my plate--well, there's this matter of reading 32 books. Again, I put that number out there arbitrarily. I felt it was a goal that I could achieve during my summer break. Alas, I've not been reading as much as I have in the past for a number of reasons. Not all of the excuses are good excuses, so I'll spare you from hearing them.

I've also got three writing projects. I worked on one of them in June--my little chapbook. I'm going to work on converting that into a book-length collection. It needs an interruption, I feel. It's too much of one particular tone and there's not enough movement to keep a reader interested for anything longer than a chapbook.

There's also the poems I wrote to take a break from some of the newish fatherhood poems I had been writing. I've got about fifteen rhetorical poems (they're in couplets) that I think would be an interesting collection.

Finally I've got a project I started about five years ago that I've stopped, focusing on migrant Filipino workers in the middle part of last century (weird to say last century).

So you see, I could be really really busy right now, but I'm choosing not to be.

I feel like I'm biding my time before I head over to the Camano Island house.

***

I am, however, discovering lots of good new music:

Rural Alberta Advantage. Seems like a lot of the stuff I like these days is from Canada. What does that say about me? Maybe it has something to do with my proximity to the US/Canada border . . .